Old MacDonald
Old MacDonald is the third Bandon course of four I rank in my Top 100 (Pacific and Bandon are here respectively). It’s an interesting concept – an ode to C.B. MacDonald’s design philosophy. It opens an interesting discussion. Here and at Arcadia, the “secondary/tertiary” courses at the resorts are unabashed replica courses. Both of these resorts chose MacDonald to mimic. Both get a lot of love from the golf magazines. OM has been a Top 100 fixture in all of the golf magazines since shortly after it opened and while Arcadia South is brand spanking new so it hasn’t had the chance yet, I already saw it appear on a best of Michigan course ranking you can play. Architect’s Club in NJ is a similar concept but is a replica course of about ten classic architects. It’s been a fixture in Golf Digest’s Best in State. I agree with the ranking for OM (the property and terrain help). Arcadia South and Architect’s? Yeah not so much though I like Architect’s a lot better than South.
So the discussion is, why the love and why the concept? All three courses promote themselves as tribute courses to the Golden Age architect(s) they’re imitating. Are there really that many golf architecture freaks who play these courses and say, “Yeah I love these MacDonald green complexes” or “in my extensive research on MacDonald design, I’d have put this bunker here and not there?” Or are these courses just a way for a few modern designers to get their rocks off?
I would say golf architecture enthusiasts are a tiny, tiny, super niche target market. And I would say that 99% of the hackers who play OM and the others don’t care. They’d be just as happy if this was called Bandon Wide-The-Fuck-Open or whatnot. Or was this a marketing ploy to the golf magazines? Ah a conspiracy theory! Play up the allusion to CB MacDonald so the rankers come out, get love jelly all over themselves and push the courses up the ranking so numbnuts like me say, “Ooh look another highly rated course, gotta go play it.”
The average Joe or Jill Golfer cares more about the course than the architect. Did they see Tiger play it? Where was it ranked on Golf Digest? If you ask most of the golfers if they wanted to play Pine Valley they’d say, “sign me up!” I bet less than 1% would know the designer. Will there be a course marketed as Old Crump? My idea peeps, if this opens up at a resort I’m suing.
So Royal Links in Vegas (imitation holes from the British Open rota), a course in Myrtle Beach I never played, and specifically the Tour 18 courses in Texas are replica courses and marketed as such. You can play Amen’s Corner. The 18th at St. Andrews. The 17th at Sawgrass. Some Pine Valley holes. These are courses the average hacker will never be able to play. Side note: I know some of the courses sued and they had to say something to the effect of, “this hole is modeled after the 11th hole at some Georgia golf club that hosts a major every year, wink, wink.”
I really liked the Tour 18 in the DFW area (never played the other one in Houston). Royal Links was good too. The golf magazines? These get no love nor mention. Here imitation is not flattery, it’s just a gimmick. Interesting.
One last thing. Is the irony lost on everyone but me that OM is an imitation of a golf architect’s work whose designs are imitations of other golf architects’ work he liked in Scotland? Chicago Golf Club and the National Golf Links both borrow HEAVILY from Scottish design concepts – the Biarritz green, Alps, Redan, Cape, Punchbowl, etc.
All of this is not to say I didn’t like Old MacDonald. I really did like it. Very different from the other courses here and while with big greens and more wide open areas to spray the ball, I scored worse here than I did at the others (that could be because it was the fourth of the courses we played in a three-day weekend), My favorite holes are the third where you crest a ridge on a blind drive and enter the bowl that the majority of the course sits within. Seven and fifteen feature greens as close to the water as OM gets (great halfway house between the seventh and eighth holes). Eight is a great par three where the green is huge and well below the tee in elevation. While I rank Pacific and Bandon above OM and Trails, I still think this is a worthwhile addition to the courses here and one of my Top 100.
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